I was wondering the same thing. I read the story only minutes after being posted, only to come back a half hour later to see it highlighted.....with no update or anything additionally intriguing in the article.

Kasper? Anyone?

Maybe I'll try to answer my own question. The article was quickly written and posted to get a jump on the competition while the writer or staff try to verify additional news that is coming in on the teletype.

Not exactly true. I can easily tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on my monitor, and that's not a huge tv. I have a few different monitors, and I can even tell the difference between the two on the 21.5 " monitor.

Good point. 720 netflix looks pretty good on my 46" samsung, and I have to concentrate to see the Blu Ray's superior picture half the time from where I sit, but the resolution of the monitor makes Netflix look quite a bit worse - it would be a big advantage

Should Apple choose to move forward with limited 1080p releases on the iTunes Store this year, it could chose to do so as direct downloads to Macs or PCs only. Alternatively, it could offer them selectively to owners of an updated Apple TV that would only display HD+ options to consumers whose internet connection it validated as sufficient.

I wouldn't be too confident about the Macs or PCs having 1080p access. (Repost, I know, but it's relevant)... Have any of you realised Apple is now favouring iPad and AppleTV for HD Rentals of a lot of movies? That's right, even if you have a glorious 27-inch iMac you can't rent HD movies, but if you have a 10" iPad you can. Of course, that's what the iPad-HDMI dongle is for if you want to watch it on the big screen (but not your iMac or Cinema Display screen).

1080p would be primarily for AppleTV streaming. iTunes on Mac or PC would have a more limited selection of movies.

Not exactly true. I can easily tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on my monitor, and that's not a huge tv. I have a few different monitors, and I can even tell the difference between the two on the 21.5 " monitor.

How far away are you sitting? a 21inch monitor at a few feet is a greater effective size than a 40inch TV at a good viewing distance. Assuming you're at regular monitor distances the equivalent TV size would be HUGE. I mean sure 1080p will look better on your monitor, but that's such a sub-optimal viewing experience for a movie anyway, that I'm not sure it's what most people paying the extra money for a 1080p download will be using.

Where in the article did Apple say it was implementing it? There are merely testing it, and trying to get ideas. Are you implying that since most homes are not ready for it, that they shouldn't even bother?

This is stage one. The bit rate won't be perfect, the sound will likely be 2.1 not 5.1 and it will probably be only rentals and only for the Apple TV (as they did with the 720p) and perhaps computers.

But if they can show some level of decent interest it encourages the studios, networks etc to work with them. Particularly in raising the quality. And it also encourages folks to try to develop better formats that can retain the quality but not the huge file size. Heck it might even encourage infrastructure improvements cause the files will still be rather big for a while.

How far away are you sitting? a 21inch monitor at a few feet is a greater effective size than a 40inch TV at a good viewing distance. Assuming you're at regular monitor distances the equivalent TV size would be HUGE. I mean sure 1080p will look better on your monitor, but that's such a sub-optimal viewing experience for a movie anyway, that I'm not sure it's what most people paying the extra money for a 1080p download will be using.

I'm on a 27" inch right now and it's about 2.5 feet away.

I'm not sure why you say watching a movie on a monitor would be a sub-optimal experience. I've seen quite a few movies on my 27" LED monitor, including a lot of 1080 content directly from cable tv, and it looks pretty darn good to me.

I wouldn't be too confident about the Macs or PCs having 1080p access. (Repost, I know, but it's relevant)... Have any of you realised Apple is now favouring iPad and AppleTV for HD Rentals of a lot of movies? That's right, even if you have a glorious 27-inch iMac you can't rent HD movies, but if you have a 10" iPad you can. Of course, that's what the iPad-HDMI dongle is for if you want to watch it on the big screen (but not your iMac or Cinema Display screen).

1080p would be primarily for AppleTV streaming. iTunes on Mac or PC would have a more limited selection of movies.

The next iPad [3] with the A6 housing up to 4 CPU cores and clearly a new GPU with far more cores will most definitely smoothly target 1080p as the display [ppi] will jump well beyond the threshold necessary to play it giving one a much higher screen resolution, natively.

I would be just the opposite. I'll definitely rent 1080p. Buy? Blu-Ray and rip it myself.

Well...I ripped my whole dvd collection to my HTPC but I am not set up, yet, to do that with Blu-Ray.

My connection is supposed to be 9Mbs and it is realistically around 3mbs. So downloads I could do, stream, not so much.

My Luddite parents cable connection on the other hand is just shocking in how fast that puppy is. It was great, but when they switched their phone to voip, that gave them a new tier of speed. I could steam two HD movies without breaking a sweat and they have no hard caps. F*&ck!

I suppose it's time to set up a Window's based Blu-Ray solution since I won't be able to do it on the Mac side.

The next iPad [3] with the A6 housing up to 4 CPU cores and clearly a new GPU with far more cores will most definitely smoothly target 1080p as the display [ppi] will jump well beyond the threshold necessary to play it giving one a much higher screen resolution, natively.

Indeed, that is quite likely. The point remains, I think 1080p HD rentals will always be more available on iPad and AppleTV compared to PC and Mac, just like 720p HD rentals right now. (Look up The Adjustment Bureau for example on your PC/Mac and notice the little "available to rent in HD on iPad and AppleTV")

I'm not sure why you say watching a movie on a monitor would be a sub-optimal experience. I've seen quite a few movies on my 27" LED monitor, including a lot of 1080 content directly from cable tv, and it looks pretty darn good to me.

It's suboptimal for a bunch of reasons, primarily the closeness of the screen which magnifies any other fault in your stream while introducing strain on your eyes. It's not terrible obviously, it's just not the kind of 'home theatre' setup that most people who are going to pay extra for better video are likely to be using.

It's like Apple selling super-audio music and us comparing how they sound on iPod earbuds. If you use iPod earbuds you wouldn't be the target market

It's suboptimal for a bunch of reasons, primarily the closeness of the screen which magnifies any other fault in your stream while introducing strain on your eyes. It's not terrible obviously, it's just not the kind of 'home theatre' setup that most people who are going to pay extra for better video are likely to be using.

I actually prefer watching movies at the computer, with headphones. More immersive. But then I also sit in the first or second row at the movies which most people hate!

My point was that regardless of what is done with 1080 content - much of the Netflix catalog is by design older and or more obscure titles - where the original source material predates even 480p.

There isn't anything anywhere that predates 480. And ANY feature film or TV show originally shot on film benefits from 1080p presentation, film is higher resolution than HD [Excluding formats like 8mm]. HD as a home presentation technology is a new thing, but high resolution film images go all the way back to the beginning.

Not exactly true. I can easily tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on my monitor, and that's not a huge tv. I have a few different monitors, and I can even tell the difference between the two on the 21.5 " monitor.

Monitor size is only one half of the equation. The other is viewing distance. If you're watching a large screen closer, then you will get the benefit of higher resolutions, but smaller screens at greater distances- the human eye can't discern the greater detail. Once again, use this chart as a guide-

I wouldn't be too confident about the Macs or PCs having 1080p access. (Repost, I know, but it's relevant)... Have any of you realised Apple is now favouring iPad and AppleTV for HD Rentals of a lot of movies? That's right, even if you have a glorious 27-inch iMac you can't rent HD movies, but if you have a 10" iPad you can.

If I had to guess, I'd bet that it's a point negotiated with the studios, who are worried about people being able to do screen grabs or rips of rental content on a Mac, where doing that is impossible on an iPad, iPhone, or AppleTV. You can BUY HD content on a Mac from the iTunes store, but if you've done that, there's not much point in ripping it, is there...?

The important thing about 1080p finally coming to the iPhone/iPad/AppleTV is that I'll no longer need to have special rips to play files on my AppleTV (of course, it'll need to get jailbroken to play MKVs but I can live with that).

Download to your Mac or PC then stream from your mac/pc to your AppleTV. Of course I have the current AppleTV so I'm limited to the lower HDTV but at the price of AppleTV, I could be convinced to get a new AppleTV.

Another option is to put enough solid state RAM in the Apple TV to hold say 4 hours of HDTV so you have the space to hold one very long movie locally.

I'm looking forward to monitors that do more than 16:9, as that is insufficient for watching most movies. I would like a 2.35 :1 monitor at least. And I think that those kind of tv's and monitors will be coming in the future.

But then the movie studios will start creating other screen formats so you will never be able to see a movie in full screen on a TV or monitor. That way, the studios can keep people going to theaters and raising ticket prices-- so they can see movies "the way they are meant to be seen, as the director intended".

Download to your Mac or PC then stream from your mac/pc to your AppleTV. Of course I have the current AppleTV so I'm limited to the lower HDTV but at the price of AppleTV, I could be convinced to get a new AppleTV.

Another option is to put enough solid state RAM in the Apple TV to hold say 4 hours of HDTV so you have the space to hold one very long movie locally.

A current HD movie is about 4GB. I believe the current generation AppleTV has 8GB of storage to buffer streaming material. So technically you could stream some 1080 movies depending on length, but for safety they'd probably have to bump the internal storage to 16GB.

Who cares about the 1080p spec... what will the compression ratio be? It doesn't matter if they have 60 frames a second at full resolution if all of those pixels are filled with macroblocks during any sort of motion.

Exactly. I don't rent 720p from Apple any more, because the quality is only marginally better than SD.

This is really strange, because I was just going to say the same thing back to YOU, except you've said exactly what I was going to say.

If you can't tell that Apple's "720p" content is horribly compressed and terrible to look at, you have serious problems somewhere on your end.

I'm not saying that it isn't compressed, and I'm often surprised at what still frames of shows that I've bought in HD look like on my computer, but on a TV- actually watching the shows in motion, to say there isn't a clear difference between the SD and HD material is misleading. You can pick apart still images, but as an experience, it's clearly sharper, way better than broadcast HD, and I'll take that option every time it's available. And if you can't say that, then I'd wager you're sitting too far from your TV.

This is really strange, because I was just going to say the same thing back to YOU, except you've said exactly what I was going to say.

If you can't tell that Apple's "720p" content is horribly compressed and terrible to look at, you have serious problems somewhere on your end.

I find Apple's 720p quality excellent, and much better than SD, although still short of bluray quality. I suspect that some TVs accentuate compression artifacts more than others. Cranking up the TV's sharpness and contrast settings too high can do this.

A current HD movie is about 4GB. I believe the current generation AppleTV has 8GB of storage to buffer streaming material. So technically you could stream some 1080 movies depending on length, but for safety they'd probably have to bump the internal storage to 16GB.

In theory, yes, but nobody wants to wait an hour for a show to buffer enough so that it won't stall halfway through.

In theory, yes, but nobody wants to wait an hour for a show to buffer enough so that it won't stall halfway through.

As it does now, your wait will vary depending on your connection speed. When I first got my G1 AppleTV, HD movie rentals tended to take about 5 minutes to buffer, but after 1 stalled film early on I'd usually wait 10.

Today, since the release of the G2 AppleTV [and I don't own one, I'm still on G1] buffering seems to happen much faster. I don't know what they've done but HD movies are usually available within a minute or two, and I've never had one fail. And I'm usually renting a movie a week.

What I'm saying is, if I have to wait double that length for a 1080 movie [2-4 minutes], that's not a deal killer for me.

Besides frame size and compression rate, we also have to keep in mind that as the processor in iOS devices get beefier, their ability to utilize more efficient but more processor intensive codecs becomes greater. You can get the raw size down on movies if the processor decoding the file can take up the slack. Eventually, compression will become more invisible, and movies delivered at 1080p will get closer and closer to being imperceptible from BluRay for 99% of people. And I think the time scale on this is shorter than some people think.

Although all movies can be de-interlaced to 480p, some TV shows shot on video predate 480p, and are inherently 480i

I'm trying to understand what you're saying. There isn't a single theatrically released "movie" in the last 100 years that's resolution is capped at 480p. Films took a resolution hit when they were scanned for broadcast on TV. The original film material has, in many cases, an effective resolution many times higher than 1080p.

For Example, the recent restoration of the 1939 film WIZARD OF OZ. The nitrate elements were digitally scanned at 8K for archival purposes. That's approximately 8 times the resolution of current 1080p.

As for TV. Interlacing was the method by which the material was broadcast, and not necessarily recorded. Many early TV shows video signal was direct recorded to film for archiving.

In fact, the WORST period in terms of longevity would seem to be the 80's and 90s, when finishing was done on video. So whereas the original STAR TREK can have it's original film negative scanned for release on BluRay, STAR TREK: TNG is stuck at 480i, since it was edited, and it's visual effects produced at that resolution.

But shows like ANDY GRIFFITH, GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, or LOST IN SPACE could all be released on BluRay, and benefit very much from it.

Here's a handy chart that shows the resolution of images from web all the way up to 8K. NTSC is #16, 720p is #14, and 1080p is #12: